Category Archives: Personal Projects

…Only Missy exists, for now. The young girl, the girl named Melissa? She is dead. She doesn’t know when her past self died, but she is certain that the death of her parents was a major cause of Melissa’s passing. But maybe, just maybe, that girl Melissa can be revived. It may take years. Many years until she is redeemed. But when that time comes, Melissa Alice McDive will live once more.

Creating an original cast of characters, a world for them to live and explore, and a decent story to tie it all together is a difficult task. It could take as much as a decade to finally even understand your own characters and how their world works. However, I only have 25 weeks to figure it out. Or had 25 weeks: Week 9 of my school project ends tomorrow.

Evolution of the Plot
The original idea for “Missy” came about in September: it would be a lighthearted little animated short about a young girl who travels to the moon in search of her pet turtle, Oscar. Along the way she would meet pirates, talking rocks, and a magic banjo that could grant any wish. It was then called “Missy and the Wonders of Moonmen”, and I started storyboarding the nonsensical little tale right away. Then came the English assignment to make a piece of literature of over one hundred pages by the end of May. It was given in early October, so with the idea of Missy still very much fresh in my head, I decided to use the concept and make it into a comic. However, I really wanted to change it up a bit, so the journey to the moon became a journey to Hell.

In this version of “Missy”, the character’s parents died when she was five-years-old. For reasons unexplained and unknown to the reader, Missy was able to insert the spirit of her deceased mother into the pet turtle she got the day of the murder, just a few years prior to the start of the book where she is a sophomore in high school. While taking a stroll in the park, her home was broken into and the turtle stolen. Missy’s search for the shell-wearing parent figure leads to her being dragged into the recesses of the Earth where she makes a deal with the Devil that will not only give her back the turtle, but her parents as well. Of course, there is a catch and it is eventually seen that Missy was the person who killed her parents all along. This dark-comedic story was entitled “Missy’s Turtle”.

Earlier this month, I decided to rewrite the plot once more. I replaced the “Hell” plot with an old idea I had about a young child prodigy who kills his parents, puts the blame on his older sister, and sets his sights on world domination. Removing world domination angle and the older sibling, the current & final plot for the comic has now been formed. The idea now is that Missy killed her parents at the age of five, but the authorities couldn’t figure out how to punish such a young child with murder. She is then put into the custody of a local butcher who she grows a shaky friendship with over the next ten years. But when he is suddenly put to death, Missy is blamed for it and she can now be tried for first- and second-degree murder. To escape jail time, she wanders the country in an effort to seek both the true killer and redemption for her past crime…